A Guest in Bear Country

By: Jessika Bouvier

The rain could not diminish her. She was big, beautiful, cinnamon-blonde fur from head to hump, her haunch and inner ears the oily brown of coffee beans. Bent forward, she preened a black cottonwood shrub of its nascent leaves, snout obscured by verdure. 

Beneath us, the van’s tires crushed chunks of gravel that drifted from shoulder to lane, and, hearing the sound, she raised her head to look.

From the passenger seat, Simä clicked her teeth, frantically adjusting her lens. Her face was glued to the viewfinder of her Nikon. 

The bear is very beautiful, she said, English made rounder by Swiss-Germanness, but I wish it would stay still.

Less than four seconds were we suspended in the grizzly’s attention before she continued down the highway, searching for more saplings against which to set her teeth. 

We craned our necks to watch her go.

Traveling from Washington D.C. to the Yukon required two big planes, one small plane, and one regular-sized car. But first: a pit stop at my parent’s house. 

My mother—disabled, unable to work and therefore abnormally, chronically online—wedged beside me on the couch. 

Have you seen that Man or Bear meme? she asked. I had not. 

There’s a question going around where women are asked if they’d rather be stuck in the woods with a man they don’t know or a bear. What would you pick?

Bear, I said, the word flying out of me.

Exactly, she said. She showed me a compilation on her phone of other women who picked “bear.” We laughed together on the couch in the ugly and unshy way women do when only with one another. 

My stepdad, it turned out, overheard us. He announced from the kitchen that he was not pleased. In fact, he was offended, unable to fathom why any woman would opt to be alone in the woods with a wild animal instead of a man. Although wonderful, he is prone to this, grumbling at ideologies that exist outside of his purview. 

Well we don’t mean you, sweetie, my mother said. She looked at me. In times like these, it was her job to console; it was my job to make feminism milquetoast enough for spoon-feeding. 

I just shrugged. At least if the bear attacked me, I said, everyone would believe me. 

He slurped noisily from his coffee mug, as if to indicate the intensity of his disapproval. 

Simä, Bri, and I were huddled in the van, eating oddball sandwiches of ingredients we could extract from the cooler without disrupting the well-packed trunk. The wind peeled off the Saint Elias mountain range to the west, their faces snow-capped, the nearer peaks visibly green beneath. The farther mountains glowed navy in the understory of the low overcast, seeming mystical and faraway and doomed by storms. The range was our steady companion on the ride north to Haines Junction.  

Pyer, our guide, ate his lunch just outside the driver door, using the seat warmed by his own ass as a table. It was our fourth day on the road but already he and I developed a flirtation of a goading pedigree. Any sigh or mumble or groan that left our mouths was made into immediate fodder for jokes. It was an easy way to pass the time, a cheap laugh. He was almost twenty years older than me, only four years younger than my stepdad. And anyway, we were more invested in entertaining Bri and Simä than in one another. 

When Pyer blurted merde between bites of lunch, I quipped something about spilled ketchup—he’d already stained his new Fjällräven’s with bleach the night before during dish duty—but, staring at his phone, he looked dejected. 

We’ll have to sleep somewhere else tonight. There was a bear attack at the campground. It’s closed. 

He read the statement aloud to us: a woman and her German Shepherd went jogging at 10:30pm along a trail on the periphery of the campground, the last bits of sun lighting the way. (This bewildered us; everywhere in the Yukon, via sign or by people, were warnings that wildlife was most active after nightfall.)

The jogger rounded a corner on a group of three grizzly bears. There was a fourth bear, too, grazing several feet behind her, though she wouldn’t notice until later. I imagined the bears sleepy-eyed in the yellow grass, just beginning their day.

As the jogger attempted to create space, the German Shepherd broke free of its leash, chasing off two smaller bears at full speed. The third bear retaliated defensively. It took the woman’s head between its jaws and shook. She could not remember all the details of the minutes spent in its maw. Only that her body was helpless but to follow where it was thrown, the immense pressure across her temples blinding, her mantric thoughts: I’m not ready to leave my daughter and husband.

Then: the bear let her go. The alligator clip cinching her hair shattered, the springs ricocheting around the boar’s throat. The loose tendrils, once brunette, were matted in red blood, grazing the new wounds along her face, spine, and broken arm as she ran to duck behind a tree. 

The bear charged again, slapping its paw against the tree trunk, but became distracted by the return of the barking German Shepherd. It was a small enough opening for the woman to flee through a ditch and back onto the Alaska Highway, where she called her husband and 911.

In the statement, Yukon Conservation Officer Services wrote that the three bears who “matched the description provided” were found at the scene and “euthanized”. The fourth bear remained “at large” somewhere within the Kluane Reserve—home to the most genetically diverse population of grizzlies in North America. 

Pyer climbed back into the car, put off his lunch. 

Fucking tourists, he muttered. 

He shifted the van into drive, either missing or ignoring the ironic tension that filled the van. The places we each—including Pyer—called home were over 3,000 miles away.

By the time we reached the shores of Dezadeash Lake, the midnight sun began to wane. Pyer cooked our dinner in the dusky light while Bri, Simä, and I set up camp beside a wall of alders, hoping the trees would blunt the wind coming off the lake. Above the canopy I could spot the edges of a Yukon summer sunset.

Swiping my phone from the van, I told Pyer I’d be right back. I took off toward one of the neighboring tent sites for an unobstructed view of the opposite shore, where golden fingers stretched down from the sky to trace the ridges of the mountains. 

Don’t get eaten by a bear, he called after me. Otherwise I might lose my job. 

There are many versions of “The Woman Who Married the Bear,” an oral narrative still told across cultures, Indigenous and otherwise. The version I first read was told by Tom Peters, an Inland Tlingit man, translated by the Tlingit poet Nora Dauenhauer in 1980.

The way Peters told it: two sisters ventured into the woods to pack out moose meat. They also came across berries, which they gathered. While picking, one of the sisters stepped in grizzly bear scat. 

Aağáa áwé—at that point—the sister insults the bear. Some orators emphasize the insult itself, but in Peters’s version, he lets the listener imagine the slight.

Out of thin air appears a young man. He tells her to come with him. At first she resists, but he beckons:

They walked for days that felt like minutes crossing mountains that felt like logs. This was her new husband’s magic. He brought her to people that seemed to be her own, though when dawn came she saw the people were not people: they were bears. 

A year passed; winter came. She and her husband settled in a den which seemed to her like a house of branches. They had two children. But the woman left traces of their whereabouts, enough that when spring came, her brothers set out to track her down with their dog, Chewing Ribs, and bring her home.

Her husband, the bear, saw visions of their coming. He knew he would die by the hand of her youngest brother. 

When the men came, the bear-husband turned to her, instructing her: 

At daylight, we broke camp and made our way toward the Da Kų Cultural Centre. 

The facility was bisected. Roughly half was dedicated to and run by the Champagne and Aishihik First Nations (CAFN). On display in the lobby were features from their Heritage Collections: tan hide mukluks beaded with red and blue flowers; baby slippers lined with white rabbit fur; a colorful belt; a formline drawing of a wolverine. 

Farther inside, standalone poster-boards ten feet tall showcased the various historic villages within their territory. Łu Ghą in the Tatshenshini River basin, where the salmon spawn and fishing is ample; Nuqwa’ik Àłsêxh to the south, now federally bound to British Columbia, where glaciers dominate and where the CAFN Dän first formed trade and cultural relationships with coastal Tlingits; Dakwäkäda, meaning “high cache,” now called Haines Junction, the land on which we now stood. 

The other half of the facility housed the Kluane National Park and Reserve Visitors Centre. The exhibits on this side were typical. We circled a 3D model of Kluane’s icefields. Beneath were drawers of animal furs, number patches sewn onto the underside of their pelts. Visitors were meant to guess which species the furs came from, then match their guesses to a key on the wall. 

In the auditorium, Bri, Simä, and I watched a film on the CAFN’s struggle to retain Aboriginal hunting rights while Pyer chatted up the front desk ladies. 

Back in the van, he told us the community writ-large was furious about the attack. The bears were a family—a mother and her three growing cubs—provoked, now dead. The matriarch had birthed several litters in the area over the past decade. It was more than the end of three lives; it was the end of a lineage, a bloodline that could never be resuscitated. 

In an updated statement, Yukon Conservation Officer Services elaborated on a prevailing rationale: once a bear attacks a human, it may misunderstand the human as prey. The bear may also view humans as a reliable food source, actively hunting others. Euthanization is conducted in the interest of public safety. 

Curious, I looked up how bears are euthanized, envisioning a sedative dart the size of a blimpie. The answer is a shotgun, fired, preferably, at close range. 

Over the two weeks following the attack, we saw moose and black bears and porcupines and bison and Dall’s porpoises and puffins and humpback whales and red squirrels, but no other grizzlies. Our encounter along Haines Highway was the first and last. 

Simä left the trip a day early, onwards to another group expedition in Vancouver Island from our last stop in Anchorage. To soften our group’s tearful goodbye and thank him for the trip, Bri and I promised to buy Pyer a very large, very cold beer from the hotel bar. 

On the way down, I met him in the parking lot to retrieve some miscellaneous items left behind in the van. As I approached, he jumped from his hiding place near the trunk, laughing at my surprised shriek. 

He ogled me, whistling low. So you wait until the trip is over to bother putting in a little effort? He flitted his fingers in front of my face, gesturing to the mascara on my eyelashes, the necklace hugging my throat, my ears full of studs once more. Luxuries I’d kept stored in my pack while on the road.

So, what, you were checking the whole time to see whether or not I was putting on makeup for you?

I’m a man, he said, laughing as he shrugged. I’m always checking.

Months later, the media ran their own versions of the story. The jogger, on a small press run, gave interviews reflecting on her attack in which she identified the mauling bear as an in-rut boar. 

This struck me as unusual; bears do not typically travel in packs. Boars will sometimes, though rarely, kill cubs in order to mate with their mothers, since nursing sows don’t enter estrus. Otherwise, boars steer clear. 

Full necropsies were initiated by Yukon Conservation Officer Services on the killed bears in order to establish group dynamics, as well as any possible genetic links. The details were never publicly released.

Interestingly, the jogger was not a tourist as Pyer assumed: she was a resident of Haines Junction, identified in one of the interviews as Kaska Dena. “I have a really good respect for them … just because of growing up with my dad and everything.”

She emphasized the attack was blameless; neither she, her dog, nor the bears deserved animosity. It was a case of wrong place, wrong time. “It could’ve happened to anybody.”

The Facebooking members of Haines Junction did not appear to agree.

Geez … this story really hurts my heart. I feel so sad for those Ätsì shäw (bears), they didn’t deserve this. They’re family has been in that area for a long time it’s not new, and it’s not surprising to see them in the woods.

This IS bear country. Why would you run with your ear buds in? If they were really going to attack her she’d be gone. She’s very lucky … So sorry bears have to die because of human ignorance. 

A person staying at the campground said he heard four shots and lots of officers carrying guns. I think transparency is missing from the officers reports.

They don’t “euthanize” bears. They kill them.

Note on Sources 

Tom Peters (Yeilnaawú)’s version of “The Woman Who Married the Bear” referenced in this essay was translated by Nora Marks Keixwnéi Dauenhauer, and published in the first volume of Haa Shuká, Our Ancestors: Tlingit Oral Narratives. It was the second transcription of his telling. The original recording of Tom Peters’s telling can be heard here, under the “Narratives” section.

In addition, Dauenahuer’s notes on the original Tlingit telling in the addendum of the text provided insight into nuances that are often missed in the written English translation; I attempt to recreate that emphasis in my partial summary. Those notes can be read here, beginning on page 369. The full translation, which emphasizes kinetic ecology between bears and humans, as well as Tlingit cultural/familial relationships, can be accessed here. 

Jessika Bouvier is a queer Cajun writer. Her work appears (or soon will) in Puerto del Sol, monkeybicycle, Waxwing, HAD, SUNHOUSE, Split Lip, and elsewhere. 

As a 2024 Cheuse fellow, Bouvier traveled to Whitehorse to attend Adäka Festival, an annual arts and culture convening that celebrates the Yukon’s 14 First Nations communities. After, she road-tripped across the Yukon and parts of south-central Alaska to study how the history of political ecology, nature tourism, colonialism, and tribal sovereignty intertwine.